International A Publication of the International Relations Round Table of the American Library Volume 31 March 2017 Number 1 ISSN 0892-4546 By Jyldyz Bekbalaeva, American University of Central Asia, [email protected]The Republic of Kyrgyzstan is a mountainous country situated in the heart of Central Asia, with a popula- tion of six million. Since its inde- pendence in 1991, from the Soviet Union, the country’s 2000 public, academic, school and special librar- ies have steadily reshaped into civic - focused institutions and coalesced to form a network of highly dedicat- ed professionals. Library and Information Consortium In 2002, the Library and Infor- mation Consortium of Kyrgyzstan was formed, and is now one of the most dynamic professional associa- tions in the country. Among the Consortium’s goals are professional trainings, strengthening advocacy, and offering financial and techno- logical assistance. With donor sup- port, the Consortium has initiated programs to promote the role of the library in supporting education, cul- ture and civic participation and has implemented projects to increase access to information, build the ca- pacity of librarians, conduct nation- wide educational and cultural pro- grams, foster regional library coop- eration and digitize local materials. The library community in Kyrgyz- stan actively engages with various national and international partners to shape and advance its agenda and provide critically needed services to the Kyrgyz population. The Con- sortium benefits from input and sup- port from the international library community with programs such as professional and cultural exchanges and other cross-border initiatives. Annual Library Conference The country’s first national library conference was held in 1999 and today is an annual gathering of in- formation professionals at Lake Is- syk-kul. Attendees are mostly Kyr- gyz librarians, but conference par- ticipants have traveled from neigh- boring countries and overseas. The conference is not only a rare oppor- tunity for information professionals to travel and experience the Central Asian region but to offer their val- ued experience and knowledge at the forum. International participa- tion is critical for the growth of the library community in Kyrgyzstan. Each year the conference is held in October 1-5, in Issyk Kul, Kyrgyz- stan. For more information please visit the website: http:// conference.bik.org.kg/. (continued on p. 6) Community of Librarians in Kyrgyzstan Seek International Partners Reading Caravan by libraries reach out to patrons in remote areas of the country
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International A Publication of the International Relations Round Table of the American Library
International Leads (ISSN 0892-4546) is published quarterly by the International Relations Round Table of the American Library Association in March, June, September, and December. IL is indexed by Library Liter-ature and Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) . The IRRT mailing address is: International Re-lations Office, American Library Association, 50 E. Huron Street, Chicago, IL 60611. Materials for IL should be sent to Co-editor, Karen Bordonaro, James A. Gibson Library, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada L2S 3A1
Welcome to the March 2017 issue
of International Leads.
This issue comes out at a time of
much political uncertainty in
international affairs, but also a time
in which libraries can play
important roles.
Articles in this issue that
underscore the importance of
library roles around the world
include a call from Kyrgyzstan for
international library partners, a call
for new scholarship in international
librarianship, and an overview of a
successful partnership
between libraries in China and
Oregon.
Also please find here a call for a
new editor of International Leads to
begin after ALA Annual 2017.
Thanks for reading this issue, and
thanks for your continued
commitment to international
librarianship.
Karen Bordonaro and
Gail Sacco,
IL co-editors
Call for Submission
MAY 1 Deadline for the June issue:
Do you have news about… International library activities?
People international librarianship?
international conferences?
Then why not submit to International Leads? Send your news and stories to the co-editors: Karen Bordonaro, [email protected], Gail Sacco, [email protected]
International Relations Round Table (IRRT) seeks a volunteer editor for International Leads commencing July 2017. The IL Editor serves a two-year term, renewable once, which begins immediately following the 2017 ALA Annual Conference. International Leads (IL) is the official publication of the International Relations Round Table (IRRT). The purpose of IL is to disseminate information about international librarianship and the activities of the Round Table. IL seeks to support Round Table and Association objectives by bringing members news, brief articles and reviews that help them understand and react appropriately to recent developments in international librarianship. It seeks items of timely value and emphasizes current reports and programs undertaken by the Association and the IRRT. IL is published quarterly, edited by a member volunteer and uploaded to the IRRT website by the IRRT Webmaster. The Editor of International Leads is responsible for publication of the International Relations Round Table quarterly newsletter including size, content, layout, typography, and other aspects of formatting. The Editor reports to IRRT Publications Committee and IRRT Executive Board. Previous issues are available on the IRRT website at:
Responsibilities:
Coordinate International Leads working with the IRRT Publications Committee and the IRRT Executive Board.
Have responsibility for the content, form and design of IL within the parameters of ALA and IRRT policies and in consultation with the IRRT Publications Committee, the IRRT Executive Board, the ALA International Relations Office (IRO).
Seek manuscripts and encourage the submission of high-quality articles.
Review all submitted manuscripts in light of the philosophy, purpose, and general style of the publication. Correspond with authors regarding acceptable, rewriting and resubmission, or rejection of articles.
Edit and proof manuscript copy.
Assume final authority for all content in each issue of IL.
Serve as a non-voting, ex-officio member of the IRRT Publications Committee and the IRRT Executive Board.
Attend IRRT Publications Subcommittee and IRRT Executive Committee meetings at ALA Annual and Midwinter meetings.
Qualifications:
Experience in publishing and/or journalism, either in editing or writing, sufficient to be able to produce a high-quality publication that addresses interests of the readership.
Effective communication skills.
Experience in or demonstrated knowledge of international librarianship.
Membership in the International Relations Round Table. More information about the IL Editor’s responsibilities and the editorial statement are available on the IRRT website at: http://www.ala.org/irrt/intlleads/edstatement/editorialstatement
Call for International Leads Editor
International Leads Web Site
http://www.ala.org/irrt/intlleads/
internationalleads
Applications are due by March 31, 2017.
Applications should include a brief statement about your in-terest in the position and a de-scription of your skills and background relevant to the po-sition, particularly your experi-ence in publishing and/or jour-nalism, as well as a current re-sume or CV. Send inquiries and applications to Colleen Schalm at [email protected]
By Xiaoai Ren, Valdosta State University, United States; Guoying Liu, University of Windsor, Canada; Keven Liu, Shanghai Library, China; Yongming Wang, The College of New Jersey, United States; Qing Zou, Lakehead University, Canada The Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA) is proud to announce the launch of its new publication - The International Journal of Librarianship (http://journal.calaijol.org). This is an international, peer-reviewed, and open access journal. It is fully committed to the Open Access Initiative and will provide free access to all articles as soon as they are published. The inspiration for IJoL emerged from the apparent need to provide a dedicated venue for CALA members to exchange their research findings and best practices. It is founded to both recognize and embody the increasingly prominent role of international librarianship, especially Chinese librarianship in shaping the LIS field. IJoL encourages, and editors welcome submissions across a wide variety of topics that support the mission of the journal. It publishes original research findings, theoretical explorations, and case studies from librarians, information scientists, library school faculty and students of Chinese heritage, as well as by librarians and information professionals of other nationalities on broader issues. It reports major development of the Chinese librarianship around the world. It also invites reviews of monographs, books, and reports about library and information science. The editors of IJoL are responsible for the final selection of content of the journal and reserve the right to reject
any submissions deemed inappropriate for publication. All feature articles are double-blind peer reviewed and adhere to the highest editorial standards. IJoL is published semiannually. The inaugural issue of the IJoL was published in December, 2016. This issue covers a wide variety of topics including: the current state of library makerspaces; eBook service in Shanghai Library; a survey study of the current status of Chinese academic library services; improving Chinese digital resources’ discovery and access by leveraging NISO standards and best practices; and a case study of how a university library is taking up challenges to adapt to the dynamic higher education environment. If anything is distinct to readers of our first issue, we hope it is the rich information on Chinese librarianship out there to share.
This is the first of many issues and the start of many conversations. Following the successful launch of this inaugural issue, the IJoL is now calling for papers for a special issue which will be published in the summer of 2017 on data services and management. This is a rapidly evolving area, and around the world librarians are facing many distinct technological, regulatory and theoretical challenges. The IJoL invites both LIS practitioners and researchers to share their experiences and strategies on any aspects of academic and research data services and data librarianship. We encourage you to share your work with us – and, more importantly, with your peers. Your sharing through IJoL will inform practices that strengthen international librarianship, Chinese librarianship in particular, and will increase the knowledge in this field greatly.
Introducing the International Journal of Librarianship—IJoL
attendees at the meeting Dr. Zain Abdel Hady and faculty members of Helwan University
celebrating finishing the program
Dr. Mohamed and Dr. Elmeawad lecturing to the faculty members in Helwan University
By Dr. Hesham Mohamed and Dr. Salwa Elmeawad, Queens Public Library, New York
March 2017 International Leads 9
By Richard Sapon-White Oregon State University The Horner Library Exchange, celebrating its twentieth year in 2016, began as a collaboration between the Fujian (China) Provincial Library and the Oregon State Library. It is one of only two such exchange programs administered by a state library association (in this case, the Oregon Library Association). I have been involved in the program since 2002 and coordinator of the Oregon side for the past nine years. Last fall, I was one of three Oregon delegates to visit Fujian, finally taking the plunge to travel there myself.
In the early years, our colleagues in Fujian would send two librarians to Oregon for a month, alternating with one Oregon librarian traveling to Fujian for up to six weeks the following year. Starting in 2007, this pattern changed to three-week visits every three years, with four Fujian librarians coming to Oregon and three Oregonians visiting Fujian. During their time abroad, librarians visited a multitude of public, academic, school, and special libraries; gave lectures about the latest developments in their home libraries; and went sightseeing. Originally, funds for the Oregon side of the exchange came from a bequest by Dr. Layton Horner. Once those moneys were spent, the Oregon State Library continued to provide funds for the exchange. Oregon delegates also were required to contribute to their own travel. The Fujian provincial
government provided for all room and board in China, as well as land transportation. Plans are underway to do fundraising to ensure future exchanges.
In May, 2016, Oregon hosted Li Fan, Huaqiao University Library in Quanzhou; Chen Wenge, Quanzhou Municipal Library; and Liu Xuzan and Lin Yongxiang, Fujian Provincial Library. In the course of three weeks, they spoke with library staff the length of the Willamette Valley as well as visiting the Columbia River Gorge. As has been our custom, a banquet on the last night ensured that our guests had a great sendoff and departed with distinctively Oregonian gifts – CDs of Portland-based Pink Martini and books about the history of the Chinese in Oregon.
In October, Jian Wang (Portland State University), Veronica Vichit-Vadakan (Oregon College of Oriental Medicine), and I embarked for our three-week visit to Fujian Province. We were accompanied during the first week by Rosalind Wang, a retired librarian and past Horner alumna whose efforts over the three decades laid the foundation for the exchange and built many bridges between Fujian and Oregon; Amy Lee, a 2010 Horner alumna; and MaryKay Dahlgreen, Oregon State Librarian. Our itinerary was a mixture of library tours and meetings with library staff at twenty-four libraries as well as sightseeing in Fuzhou, the provincial capital, Xiamen, the largest city in the province, and Quanzhou, a bustling metropolis that was the terminus of the maritime Silk Road.
During our time abroad, Veronica and I maintained a blog to keep our families, friends, and library communities informed on our doings and whereabouts. What follows are some highlights from our trip and the impact that this experience has had on me.
While I enjoyed touring each library, my favorite moments were sitting down with library staff and discussing our work. Our hosts would describe their latest accomplishments: the opening of a new building, producing videos of vanishing minority art and culture, the preservation of ancient books. We would talk briefly about similar developments in our libraries. Then the moment would come for asking questions – and that is when we would really connect. Those questions revealed what we each really wanted to know about the people on the opposite side of the table. These friendly interrogations often took the form of “do you do X?” or “how do you do Y?” We asked: Do you have obligations to collect datasets from your researchers? (Short answer: no, not yet, but we know this is something that is happening elsewhere.) Where do you get funding for your cultural preservation projects? (“The provincial government.”) And in turn we were asked: Who pays for the books that the public library book clubs read? (Answer: the public library – we don’t make our patrons purchase their own books.) When will Bibframe be implemented? (Answer: it’s too early to say specifically!) Through this exchange of questions, I had the feeling that both sides of the table were asking: Are your libraries like ours? And how are we different?
(continued on p. 10)
Twenty Years of Building Bridges between Oregon and
Fujian, China: The 2016 Horner Exchange
Richard in front of welcome sign
Laura (our translator), Oregon State Librarian MaryKay Dahlgreen, Jian Wang, Veronica Vichit-Vadakan, Jinjiang Public Library staff member
Ultimately, I learned that we are all simultaneously the same and differ-ent. Both sides of the Pacific are in-terested in funding, the latest tech-nology, and innovative services. In many instances, we are doing the same things: cooperative cataloging (although carried out in different ways), purchase-on-demand, digiti-zation projects. But many times we heard or saw things that are not yet widespread in the United States. In Xiamen, we saw kiosks that allowed 24/7 access to books and were placed around the city. Using a library card to unlock a sliding door, a user could select from a 12-shelf collection of books that might be just outside a branch library or located inside a shopping mall. Xiamen had 116 of these kiosks scattered around the city. We also saw self-service book sanitizers that used UV light to kill germs on the surface of books. I wondered about damage to the paper by the radiation, but assumed that these public library books were not destined to be part of an archival col-lection anyway. (I was also puzzled as to why these elaborate machines were in place when these same li-braries offered no soap or paper tow-els at their bathroom sinks.) Several of the large municipal libraries we visited were conducting extensive video and audio projects to document the music, dance, and crafts of ethnic minorities in the province. With funding from Beijing, staff were us-ing state-of-the-art equipment for these projects. An example of one such video is available here.
In addition to learning about li-braries in the province, we were also taken on sightseeing trips, both in the cities and the countryside.
———————————
We enjoyed seeing the Fujian tulous, round earthen buildings of several stories, dating back centuries and still inhabited. They are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On our way to see these rural structures, we drove through banana and tea plantations. The terrain is so different from Ore-gon, with lush tropical trees instead of our familiar Douglas fir and pine trees. In Quanzhou, our tour guide, Quanzhou Municipal Library Direc-tor Xu Zhaokai, took us on a walking tour of the neighborhood where he grew up, visiting Buddhist and Tao-ist temples and the oldest mosque in China, all within a few blocks of each other. In Xiamen, we visited Gulangyu Island, also known as Pi-ano Island for the many families owning pianos there, a former colony of foreign business owners and dip-lomats whose European background resulted in distinctively non-Chinese architecture.
As if the library visits and the sightseeing wasn’t enough, we were treated almost nightly to banquets, often with local and provincial digni-taries. I was somewhat concerned whether my vegan diet could be ac-commodated, but our hosts went out of their way to ensure that I had plenty to eat. While the others dined on sea cucumber, squid, and various species of fish, I was stuffed with mushrooms and related fungi of seemingly endless variety. After the first week, I commented that I had
been served dragon eyes (a fruit re-lated to lichee), dragon beard (a leafy green) and dragon fruit, to which Chen Wenge responded that dragons were vegan! (On returning to the U.S., I learned that dragon fruit are native to the New World and are grown commercially in the South-west. Funny how I had to travel so far to discover something so near.) I would be remiss if I did not also mention the tea ceremonies that we were treated to. I found them so in-teresting that I bought a tea set for myself. You can watch a Fujian tea ceremony here.
As with all of my travels abroad, it was difficult to have to say good-bye and return home. I learned so much about the libraries we visited that I am still processing the trip. I will be sharing what I learned at an upcoming seminar at my library and a presentation with my fellow dele-gates at the Oregon Library Associa-tion. I know that I am very commit-ted to ensuring the continuation of the exchange program and will be an enthusiastic fundraiser for it. I am also attempting to start some ongoing
collaborations with colleagues in Fu-jian, which should solidify the rela-tionships established in 2016. My hope is that the Horner Exchange will continue for many more years so that it can be a source of inspiration, learning, and cooperation between our two countries.
“OSU Libraries Hosts Visitors from Fujian Province, China,” International Leads 17:3 (Sept. 2003)).
